"If you're not the customer, you're the product"
This saying came about when there was a boom in free services, which had to rely on advertising to stay profitable.
To make more revenue, they needed to make advertising more effective.
To make advertising more effective, they needed to understand their users on a personal level.
The result is that the most successful of those free services were successful because they were able to, in a sense, sell their users to companies advertising their products.
The saying may not be so true today.
There are plenty of services that take your money and still advertise to you.
You pay for a Windows licence, and yet Bing serves you ads.
Netflix is coming up with an ad-supported version as well.
How can Amazon dream of functioning without building a database of pesonalized user profiles?
A detour into ownership
Do you really own your device?
Are you able to use it as you please?
If it breaks, are you able to repair it?
Are you in full control of what happens inside your device?
A car can run the AC when there is no windshield fluid in it, because those are two unrelated systems.
Some printers do not support scanning when out of printer ink, even though they are unrelated systems.
A car can be taken to an independent repair center to swap out a faulty or worn part.
Phone and laptop manufacturers have begun entering into exclusivity contracts with component manufacturers so that spare parts are unavailable to anyone but the manufacturer.
If a car manufacturer puts a GPS inside a car to track everything you do, they are sure to get sued.
Computers track you into oblivion...
With the industry following Google in data collection, and Apple in device ownership, we're in a terrible place.
Google collects insane amounts of data, and Apple has increasingly restricted the market on repairs to the point that "repair" costs nearly as much as buying a new phone entirely.
How to not be the product
You will need to transition, where reasonable, to services with the following features.
- Open-source
An open source app is one whose source code is freely available, auditable, and redistributable.
Popular open-source projects have a lot of eyeballs on them, and the community often points out when they start having privacy concerns.
For example, a once-popular open-source audio-editing app called Audacity began to include usage tracking, and was instantly abandoned by the community.
A bunch of "forks" were created for the community to take the project forward without the tracking.
Caveat: some software is source-available (RHEL, for example), where the source code is auditable, but not redistributable.
If the developers decide to go in a direction the users do not like, there is no way to salvage it like Audacity was.
- Self-hosted
A lot of software depends on a server.
Mail, cloud storage, and many more.
While you can be certain that the app on your phone can be completely free of privacy violations, the data on the server may yet be insecure.
Some software, like Nextcloud, can be hosted by the user.
The server that hosts this blog also hosts my Nextcloud server, the difficulty of setting up which is the whole reason I came up with the idea of writing this blog as an end-to-end tutorial.
- Community-driven
Open-source software controlled by a company intent on making profits is not entirely reliable.
They may pivot to a closed source or restrictive license (Red Hat did that in violation of Linux's own license)
And don't be a miser.
Don't chase the allure of free.
That's how we got into this mess in the first place.
And make sure to donate to open-source projects that are useful to you and that accept donations.
They're mostly volunteer-supported, and could use the support.